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28 April 2013

What I Wore Sunday {12}

Some days, Little Bear is so well-behaved at mass: sitting quietly, watching Father, chewing on holy cards. Maybe slipping out once, conveniently timed during the collection or a hymn, to change a diaper or feed him quickly. It's so nice to be able to enter prayerfully into the mass, and to enjoy having our little boy there with us. Today was not one of those days.

Today Little Bear yelled and whined and squirmed and kicked and bit his way through mass, taking several trips outside, refusing to eat or be calmed down in any other way I could think of. I think he's cutting another tooth, but we had even thought ahead and given him preemptive Tylenol before leaving the house! I was so thankful for the mom sitting next to me in the pew, her adorable five-month-old sitting silently in his carseat all the way through mass (how did they teach him that???), who picked Little Bear up for me as another meltdown was threatening, bouncing him and making faces until he cheered up.

It hasn't been a good weekend for taking him out of the house... Friday evening, we went to the kickoff for a new Catholic radio station which was held at one of the fanciest hotels in town. They said it was a family-friendly event in all of the advertising, but he was by far the youngest there... As the first speaker was opening the event, and I was wondering how long Little Bear would behave, he grabbed my mother's coffee and pulled it over on top of himself, knocking over two other water glasses with it. Of course he yelled--from surprise, not because he was hurt--and we took him out of the room quickly to clean him up. Thankfully the coffee was already lukewarm, and further diluted by the two glasses of icewater! He was perfectly fine, and he and I had fun wandering the second floor of the hotel lobby for the next hour. I'm sorry to have missed the main speaker; we kept walking past the open doorway, and from what I heard, he was just excellent! Not the type of speaker we get frequently enough here, unfortunately: I will feel badly for the radio station folks if the fact that their speaker called a spade a spade lost them donations, but it was so refreshing to hear someone say that using birth control is evil, and to do so in a manner assumptive of the fact that everyone there was a good Catholic and therefore agreed!

Yesterday Little Bear was introduced to a key part of Alaskan manhood: the gun show. The university basketball court was filled with purveyors of new and used guns, knives, and assorted paraphernalia, as well as a few antiques and jewelry sellers catering to the wives and sisters who invariably get dragged along to these events. Matt, my father, and another friend met up and talked guns for a while, Little Bear happily adding his voice to the din in the gym. The three of them are all looking for the same gun, so it was funny to watch them split up at the door and each canvass a different section of the gym, hoping to find it before the others. None of them found what they were looking for, at least at a reasonable price; I hear that if Matt had been the lucky one, it would have wound up being my Mother's Day present. :-)

It appears that Little Bear is learning what it means when someone puts shoes on... Last night he noticed his daddy getting ready to leave the house to spend a few hours with friends at a beer tasting sponsored by local microbreweries. Little Bear dropped his toys and began crawling as quickly as he could over to where Matt stood by the door, reaching upwards for a hug. He joined me at the front window to wave bye-bye, and became sad once Daddy was gone... Not having Daddy to play with in the evening did have one perk, though, in that Little Bear was asleep for the night an hour earlier than he has been recently! I may have regretted that decision when he was awake an hour earlier than usual this morning, but it did give us enough time to get up leisurely instead of throwing things on in a mad rush to make it to mass on time.

Today's mass attire:

Blouse: thrifted
Skirt: thrifted
Little Bear's clothes are all hand-me-downs--we've been so blessed with generous friends!

(Kindly ignore the scarf Little Bear was unraveling for me just before this picture was taken--no wonder he looks happy here; he was getting into mischief!)